There are much better tools to fight spam today, but it remains a problem. In my Gmail account, I got tired of looking at the 37,493+ spam emails sitting in my account. They were just rotting there, useless. If there was an important email I was looking for which was somehow caught as a false positive, I might be able to search my spam box… but not that much spam.

So I decided to go ahead and delete all the spam email sent to an intelliot.com address. That cut it down by about 32,653 spams.

But I almost thought it hadn’t worked, because when the Gmail screen finally loaded up again, I had 16 spam emails still sitting there.

Those 16 spams were sent between the time I clicked the “Delete” button and the time the page loaded up my search results again.

At this point, I’m just getting a lot more spam than I could possibly even look at. So if your email gets caught and sent to the spambox, it’s game over. Send it again, and try not to use so many spammy words

With 4,840 spams left, it’s somewhat manageable. I can now go through and delete emails with common spam words. Let’s see if I end up with any gems in here.

Actually, I realize now just why I have so much spam. My email management system lends itself to it; and I use lots of online services. Take domain registration. I actually list a real, valid email address on each domain I register. This is required by the registry, I think, but in writing my own PHP script to get Whois info, I learned it’s extremely trivial to write a program to harvest the email addresses of everyone with a domain name.

Obviously, this isn’t my personal email, but it’s OK in any case– Gmail remains really good at filtering spam email.

I don’t know what I’d do without Google.

Hmm.. in:spam spam was an interesting search. Looks like all trash there, shaved off about a thousand emails.

Aha! I found valid emails in the spam box. in:spam subject:(google community) is the key, but it’s specific to me